Reportedly, they want to do a first — land a probe on the far side.
No mention of how they plan to communicate, though.
5 thoughts on “China And The Moon”
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Reportedly, they want to do a first — land a probe on the far side.
No mention of how they plan to communicate, though.
Comments are closed.
Semaphore? 🙂
I would assume they will do the simple orbital probe with an non retrievable lander (airbag ball, like mars?). Time it right so that the landing takes place when we can see the orbital unit and it can act as a com node to the lander. At least that is how I would do it… unless I’m planning on staying a while. Then I would spend the extra time/money to put up a redundant semi polar constellation of GPS and communication repeater micro satellites. That way I have navigation and communication anywhere on the surface and should be pretty easy to do with newer electric drive. How small can we make an atomic clock these days? Hey, that sounds like a great job for NASA. Public funded infrastructure that makes operations on the mood easier for both future corporations and scientist. So yeah, that will never happen.
IIRC they plan launch a relay satellite to halo orbit Earth-Moon L2.
That could be, but there’s no discussion of it in the article.
If I were trying to research EM waves from the far side of the moon, my program would consist of a lander positioned as close to the center of the equator as possible, relaying data and instructions to and from an orbiter. As I don’t have any formal education past Astronomy 101 (I think I got a C), I would guess that the Chinese are savvy enough to think of something similar.
They were also thinking of landing a man on the Sun, but were beaten to it by North Korea.